Intel unveils its 32/64-bit chips

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Athlon64

You forget to mention the problems with AMD's Athlon...

We had here a load of 4 Athlon based machines (purchased in December 2003) and we had large problems with boot-up (hanging during 3 out of 5 boots), slow (noticeably) performance compared to another 4 Intel Pentium 4 (supposed same speed at 3.6 GHz, but athlons with 512 MB versus Intel with only 256 MB of RAM, all equipped with 4 Seagate 36 GB SCSI Cheeta drives, same SCSI config on all) machines, which on several identical tasks, all running Windows 2K server, we could measure at about 27% slower than on Intel platforms (we had actually one Celeron (P4, 2.4 GHz) outrun athlons at certain MS-Office (Access) 2000 pro applications we use to monitor statistics on production (when we couldn't rely on the athlons as software servers, we put them to desktop duty).
If you add this (the cost involved in having people spend more time in front of supposedly faster machines (as claimed by AMD) which, in the long run exceeds the savings (maybe, since out athlon based machines came at a slightly higher price than the P4/3.6GHz) you may have buying AMD.
Still, ignoring costs etc, the worst point is the startup problems we had with all four Athlon based systems, which people flown in from AMD's on site service were unable to fix. They replaced (twice) the four machines, but we kept having the same problem (BIOS and software driver upgrades did not help, but made the machines even slower). We decided to return the machines (in April) and got 4 more Intel machines from the same vendor that have since performed flawlessly running the same software...
From my part, keep your athlons, we won't purchase any more of those.

And I almost forgot: On one of these machines, a wire stalled the CPU cooling fan, which destroyed the CPU in a few minutes. In the past, and often after years of use we had fan failures on many pentium based machines. WE never had a burned up CPU, the machines just start to stall once the temperature goes over a certain limit and after just changing the fan, the systems were up to normal. You factor in the cost of eventually damaged CPU's (acording to AMD burned up CPU's aren't covered by the warranty, although in our case the vendor replaced the chip cost free) and AMD becomes a very costly substitute to Intel...

Posted by: RZsoft   Posted on: 07/02/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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